herself a republic, and by the aid of Florence she might at this moment have maintained her liberty.  Cosimo, however, entered into treaty with Francesco Sforza, supplied him with money, guaranteed him against Florentine interference, and saw with satisfaction how he reduced the duchy to his military tyranny.  The Medici were conscious that they, selfishly, had most to gain by supporting despots who in time of need might help them to confirm their own authority.  With the same end in view, when the legitimate line of the Bentivogli was extinguished, Cosimo hunted out a bastard pretender of that family, presented him to the chiefs of the Bentivogli faction, and had him placed upon the seat of his supposed ancestors at Bologna.  This young man, a certain Santi da Cascese, presumed to be the son of Ercole de’ Bentivogli, was an artisan in a wool factory when Cosimo set eyes upon him.  At first Santi refused the dangerous honour of governing a proud republic; but the intrigues of Cosimo prevailed, and the obscure craftsman ended his days a powerful prince.

By the arts I have attempted to describe, Cosimo in the course of his long life absorbed the forces of the republic into himself.  While he shunned the external signs of despotic power he made himself the master of the State.  His complexion was of a pale olive; his stature short; abstemious and simple in his habits, affable in conversation, sparing of speech, he knew how to combine that burgher-like civility for which the Romans praised Augustus, with the reality of a despotism all the more difficult to combat because it seemed nowhere and was everywhere.  When he died, at the age of seventy-five, in 1464, the people whom he had enslaved, but whom he had neither injured nor insulted, honoured him with the title of Pater Patriae.  This was inscribed upon his tomb in S. Lorenzo.  He left to posterity the fame of a great and generous patron,[14] the infamy of a cynical, self-seeking, bourgeois tyrant.  Such combinations of contradictory qualities were common enough at the time of the Renaissance.  Did not Machiavelli spend his days in tavern-brawls and low amours, his nights among the mighty spirits of the dead, with whom, when he had changed his country suit of homespun for the habit of the Court, he found himself an honoured equal?

XI

Cosimo had shown consummate skill by governing Florence through a party created and raised to influence by himself.  The jealousy of these adherents formed the chief difficulty with which his son Piero had to contend.  Unless the Medici could manage to kick down the ladder whereby they had risen, they ran the risk of losing all.  As on a former occasion, so now they profited by the mistakes of their antagonists.  Three chief men of their own party, Diotisalvi Neroni, Agnolo Acciaiuoli, and Luca Pitti, determined to shake off the yoke of their masters, and to repay the Medici for what they owed by leading them to ruin.  Niccolo